Tag: Windows 8

The Windows Server 2012 July 2013 update rollup is an important one to install on Hyper-V servers. Specifically because of this update: 2853952 Active Directory database becomes corrupted when a Windows Server 2012-based Hyper-V host server crashes While I have been running Active Directory with no problems on Windows Server 2012, I have talked to… Read more

I recently had to do some demonstrations on my laptop – which has a 1366 x 768 display. This made it hard to use Hyper-V virtual machines, which default to 1024 x 768 and only allow you to configure 4 x 3 resolutions. Luckily, it is actually possible to setup a Hyper-V virtual machine with… Read more

Most people use the built in Hyper-V PowerShell cmdlets to control Hyper-V these days. That said, there are people out there who program directly to our WMI APIs. In Windows Server 2012 we introduced a new WMI namespace – and recently I have been getting a number of questions about how to convert code that… Read more

A while ago I did a blog post that showed you how easy it was to check what version of the Integration Services were installed inside your virtual machines. However, a number of people came back to me and said: “Ben, I do not really care about the version number of the integration services –… Read more

In the past I have pointed out the excellent WIM2VHD tool, that allows you to take Windows installation media and create template virtual machines without ever starting a virtual machine. There is now an updated version of this script that takes advantage of the new PowerShell functionality in Windows Server 2012. The result is that… Read more

Recently the “Ask the Core Team” blog did a great post about compacting a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk in Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012. You should check out their full post for the details, but the summary is that you now need to manually mount the virtual hard disks in the management operating… Read more

Recently, I needed to copy some files out of a virtual machine – which I did not want to connect to the network. After giving this some thought I realized that this would be trivially easy to do on Windows 8 / Windows 2012. In fact – I could do it with a single line… Read more

Yesterday I showed you how to convert a VHD file to a VHDX using the Hyper-V Manager user interface. Today I want to show you that it is even easier to do using PowerShell: All you need to do is run the following command: Convert-VHD .\test.vhd .\test.vhdx We will figure out whether you want the… Read more

In Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 we have introduced a new virtual hard disk format called “VHDX”. There are a number of advantages to this format: Support for greater than 2TB disks Better performance for dynamic and differencing disks Better handling of different disk sector sizes And more… But what if you have a… Read more

Recently I was working on a Hyper-V server, and was about to restart it, when I remembered that I had logged in with a different user account earlier on in the day. I had used this other user account to start the creation of a large fixed size virtual hard disk – and I did… Read more